2006/12/18

The unusually warm weather in the DC area (it was 40 degrees Farenheit at 0635 EST/EDT today, with a projected high of 70 degrees Farenheit; this is not far off the mark for the past couple of days) brought with it our yearly Cookie Exchange Party in the DC area. Lyssa and I spent a few nights last week picking up around the apartment and generally straightening up to get ready for company to come over that weekend. I stayed up late on Friday night baking chocolate cherry drop cookies for the party on Saturday evening, finally crashing around 0200 EST/EDT on Saturday morning. On the whole I think I did a pretty good job on them, but I do think that I beat the butter/sugar mixture a little too long, which is why the dough was quite a bit softer than I remember it being.

I'll post the recipe for them tonight when I get home from work.

Much of saturday was spent doing last minute cleaning up and a bit of shopping to get cleaning supplies that we'd run out of earlier that week. Lyssa and I got to see an unexpected show while walking back to the TARDIS from the supermarket: An older man (note that I do not describe him as a 'gentleman') driving an SUV took it upon himself to stop in the middle of the parking lot (further screwing up traffic) and lean out of the driver's side window to curse at a teenage kid walking toward the supermarket for some perceived traffic infraction or other (he appeared to be warming up to a full rant, and so his meaning was a bit garbled, to say the least).

Such is typical of the holiday season in Washington, DC. The streets run with the milk of human kindness.

After we got home and finished policing the area I wound up crashing in the bedroom because I'd run myself into the ground the night before. This was around 1500 EST/EDT, and Lyssa let me sleep until 1730 EST/EDT or so.

Kash and Chris were the first to arrive, somewhen around 1830 EST/EDT or so. I have to be honest, I wasn't keeping track of the order that everyone arrived in - I was more concerned with keeping everyone happy and making sure that there was enough space on the table for everyone's fare. Chris brought three different varities of snowball cookie, including a gluten-free variant and a type that included food-grade powdered caffeine as one of its ingredients. I drove out to the Metro station to pick up Hummingwolf rather early in the evening. Kyrin showed up at some point, followed by Orthaevelve and Jason (a friend in tow, whom I wound up talking quite a bit with that night), Rialian, Helen, and Emma, Duo and Jarin, Mika and Hasufin, Lauren, and later in the evening Raven stopped by.

A couple of gifts were exchanged earlier that night.. Alexius sent us two sets of Mirrormask figures. Lyssa got a hanging planter from Duo; I got a wall-mounted fishbowl, which I'm eventually going to put another betta in. In the mail earlier, I'd gotten a copy of Frater Albertus' alchemist's handbook from John on the west coast; Chris gave me a book on Wilhelm Reich's work with orgone theory. Hasufin, in between juggling plates of cookies, gave me a keyring-sized multitool, complete with miniture white LED flashlight. In the culmination of a six-month long conspiracy, Lyssa recieved her gift from Hasufin.. a pair of frosted glass candlesticks that he'd had me hide in the front closet; she recieved only a card with directions to the box.. the look on her face was priceless when she found the proper cardboard box amidst all the stuff piled in the back corner.

Nobody kept inventory of the cookies, because everybody brought something tasty, from Chris' caffeinated cookies to Cull's Black Metal Cookies (which were soft, pliant, and tasty, unlike many black metal bands) and Hasufin's chocolate banana bars, which barely lasted the night. I wish that I'd had a terminal handy because there were so many good quotes of the night, I scarcely remember all of them. Then again, maybe it's just as well, because Kyrin was in rare form last night... Orthaevelve and Lyssa discussed some practical alchemy for a friend of ours, I wound up on the balcony talking gaming with Jason for a while, and geeked out with Raven for a good bit of the evening. Unfortunately, I was not able to avoid talking about work during the party, but then again I had to blow off some steam after the kind of week I'd had. Around 2200 EST/EDT, Lauren was kind enough to dance for us, her first private performance since she officially went pro as a belly dancer.

Lauren somehow managed to balance a sword on parts of her body that I didn't think would be useful for holding objects for any length of time.

Later in the night, Kash took sick, in part due to all the sugar from the cookies, and went down for the count. Orthaevelve and Lyssa wound up taking care of him until he was felling well enough to sleep; in the meantime, it was going on 0300 EST/EDT, and everyone started trickling home because it was fast approaching too late to drive safely. After everyone that was going to leave headed for home and everyone else found crash space, I collapsed into bed to catch a few hours of sleep.

Lyssa and I woke up around 1100 EST/EDT on Sunday morning feeling much worse for wear because we'd sugar crashed while unconscious. It seems that abusing one's body is also part and parcel of the holiday season... Jarin and Duo left early on Sunday morning, and the rest of us pulled ourselves together and then hit the local Indian buffet for a meal that actually included some protein. Our next stop of the day was the Tyson's Corner Mall in northern Virginia to do a little last minute Yule shopping.

What a nightmare.

Shopping at Tyson's Corner the week before Yule makes the day after Thanksgiving look like a day at the park. There was no parking to be had; we dropped Lyssa off and hunted for a single parking space anywhere near the mall. After about an hour of roaming around like sharks, we jumped into an open space on the north side of the mall and carefully made note of where we'd left the TARDIS.

That was, as they say, only the beginning. The mall itself was packed to capacity with people who had money to spend and were going to spent it come hell, high water, or Windows. Imagine having a six inch radius of personal space for a few hours. Consider lines that stretch all the way around the store because all of the clerks locked the registers and ran for the nearest Starbucks franchise like a horde of lemmings, leaving the customers high and dry for a half hour because the lines at Starbucks aren't any shorter or moving any faster. Picture shelves stripped bare by consumer-locusts.

The mall yesterday was not fun. The mall yesterday was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

Once the group had reconvened (Kash and Hummingwolf had bolted for the Lego store, Lyssa had been in Macy's, and Chris and I were roaming around trying to find stocking stuffers, and finding the selection of everything everywhere we went lacking) we bolted for the exit and fresh air. Afterward we wound up at the Tower Records down the highway that is going out of business (to the tune of %75 off of everything) to hunt for interesting things to listen to because all of the popular stuff was already gone, leaving the oddball things that only weirdos like us are into.

That wasn't really the case.

Tower Records was thoroughly picked over. The CDs were mostly things that didn't interest any of us, the magazines were all but gone, the movies were mostly gone... the only really interesting things to be found could be neatly summarised as 'latex lesbian porn', and even then it seemed a little dodgy.

Sometime in the middle of that, Lyssa got a call from Hasufin, who wanted to go to the Italian Oven for dinner with us because we weren't able to meet up for breakfast earlier that day. Lyssa didn't much feel like cooking dinner that night and the rest of us were about to drop over from exhaustion, so this sounded like a perfectly workable idea. We made a short detour to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to pick up something and then picked our way back across route 7 to get to the restaurant.

Italian Oven: Comfort food.

After dinner, the evening sort of collapsed in on itself as everyone found someplace to curl up and rest. Lyssa and I went offline around midnight last night because we had to get up early for work today.

That about brings us up to the present... including the USB-powered Yule tree that Lyssa just gave to me as an early gift for my cube at work.

Note to self: When writing a Perl script that uses the threads module, write a governor to control how many threads are spawned at once. Perl will happily spawn as many threads as it thinks it needs, which can not only use up all of the CPU time available to it but all of the memory it can get hold of.

2006/12/15

eGold isn't safe anymore, the owner voluntarily started turning records over to the US government for analysis. Granted, most of this was due to the Shadowscene bust a while ago, but if you're trying to be discrete because you don't have anything more shady than wanting some privacy in the twenty-first century, you're SOL.

Remember, everyone: Just wanting some privacy doesn't mean that you're breaking any laws, it means that you want your private life to stay private. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

For quite a few years now, the most secure operating system (as far as the market is concerned - sorry, OpenBSD) has been considered to be the trusted variant of Sun Solaris 8. The reasons for this are many: First off, the codebase was extensively reworked to add global and local security policies (the kernel basically says, "I don't care if you're sitting at the console logged in as root, I still won't let you do that because it's not your responsibility"), all accounts, even those with administrative privileges are monitored so that everything done can be accounted for, the file system is segregated so that different users can't even see things they aren't supposed to have any access to at all (you can't even go looking), and roles are set up that cover certain responsibilities in addition to normal access privileges (for example, user accounts assigned to the role 'backup' can only access data and utilities used for backing up data, and nothing else). Important data structures carry labels that denote their security classification to limit access to the contents, also. A file on a drive can be labelled 'SECRET', and only accounts with a 'SECRET' security clearance can access them. A certain shared memory field can be labelled 'TOP SECRET/SMF' (for the sake of argument, I don't know if that's a real TS compartment or not) and only processes running as accounts that carry that security label can access them.

Trusted Solaris hasn't been widely available for quite a while.. now you can download the Trusted Solaris extensions for v10 freely. If you sign up on Sun's website you can download copies of Solaris 10 for free and use them for personal use; you don't have to pay licensing fees unless you're buying hardware for them to use in a business setting. I've done this a few times in the past and the strings attached are few and far between. But now you can download extensions for Sol10 that add Trusted Solaris capabilities, also for free. It implements all of the old set of security labels, plus classification of new stuff, like individual network connections and even desktops to enforce segregation of data.

For more information on the Common Criteria Security Certification, here's a good breakdown from IBM's website.

Remember the movie WarGames, which inspirated a whole generation of crackers and hackers? Now there is a game reminiscent of the movie called Defcon: Everybody Dies from Introversion Games, who also developed Uplink. The game is conceptually simple: You play a general of a nuclear-capable country; you position your forces strategically to take out your enemies however you can, ideally by weakening their strategies by eliminating assets and facilities (did I mention that this is a multiplayer game?); you try to lose the least.

This looks like fun...

2006/12/14

Last night was a coma night. Both Lyssa and I were completely wiped out but we somehow marshalled the strength to find and go to our local library last night, something that we've been neglecting to do for well over a year. Seeing as how we've got more than enough books to occupy us for the forseeable future, it never seemed like a priority... however, we're going to be doing quite a bit of travelling in the weeks to come and we're going to need stuff to listen to in the car, so we picked up a couple of unabridged books on CD (and by a couple I mean six or seven) to keep us occupied in the car. We also took a little time to browse the stacks and see what they had to offer.

The technical section is a little lacking but has a couple of gems. They don't have much but what they do have are fairly recent texts on C, C++, Perl, and Python and study guides for a couple of respected certifications (namely the CISSP and CCNA). The metaphysical book section was so fluffy it would have blown away with a good sneeze, leaving behind a lone copy of Magick Without Tears. The books on politics and physics, however, were extremely recent and were written from quite a few viewpoints extant in the United States at this point in history.

Afterward we stumbled to Whole Paycheque to pick up a couple of things for dinner, headed home, and all but collapsed.

Now let's catch up on a few recent developments: NIST deadlocked last week on whether or not a paper trail is required for electronic voting systems on a vote of six to six. A bill that would have killed network neutrality in the US didn't pass in Congress, either. The RIAA is lobbying a group of Federal judges called the Copyright Royalty Judges to let them cut the royalties they have to pay their signed artists even further.

Senator John McCain is at it again, this time with abill that would fine anyone with a website $300kus for not immediately deleting pictures or videos that are possibly illegal in this country. I'm starting to wonder if Senator McCain is the paid spokescritter of the Four Hoursemen of the Infocalypse (Child Pornography, Crackers, Spam, and Terrorism) because he keeps bringing up child pornography.. the reason I'm so skeptical is because child porn isn't easy to find on the Net unless you're already a part of that community and producing yourself, which is why it's so hard to break up rings of child pornographers. They don't just post snapshots on a page at Blogger or MySpace (though from time to time on social networking sites someone will be a jackass and post a photograph to someone's weblog that definitely has a limited audience for the disgust factor), it gets traded on hidden IRC channels and IM conference rooms, all run by people who really don't care if someone sees the site because it can't be traced back to them. The bill also reqires all sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, IM accounts, and websites with the authorities. This isn't going to work at all because of how easy it is to set up accounts with false names that again cannot easily be traced back to the owner. As for fan fiction... I have to be honest, there's a lot of fan fiction out there that turns my stomach, not because it's poorly written but because it deals with topics that bother me personally. Again, anonymity and a lack of a patrol force will make this a lame-duck law.

It could also be turned against web forums and blogs maintained by people who run legitimate support groups by people who genuinely want to see them taken down. The Church of Scientology is known to use such tactics against groups it doesn't like (usually groups for ex-members), and there are a few others that do the exact same thing and don't much cre how they go about it.

There is also a subtle form of censorship that could be levelled against people who are wrongly convicted because the proposed law demands the deletion of posts from sites that aren't registered - given the number of sites that you have to set up accounts to use, including many news tickers, Amazon, Google, and the business sites of many utilities and banks, it would be prohibitive to list all of them, and would penalize people who are genuinely trying to change (I know, I know.. leopards and spots, and even though I'm definitely not the most trusting individual on the Net the only way to find out is to wait and see) and make a single mistake.

One of the comments to this article also makes a good point: What happens if a website is defaced with porn? Who is liable? What if the webmaster is on vacation? Posting a comment on a site that has an <img src="blah.."> tag in it would be a great way of bringing Johnny Law and Friends down on the site of someone you want to get revenge on... not that this ever happens. No. Not ever.

2006/12/13

If you've been keeping an eye on the BBC website, they've had a Doctor Who Advent calendar up for a while. Each day they unveil another goodie, such as print-and-send Yule cards, concept art, games, and clips of audio and video to listen to. One of the first things they put up was a copy of a song from last year's Yule special, The Christmas Invasion by Murray Gold, which was entitled A Song for Ten (which is very well written and gives a few hints about season 28, love it or leave it). One thing I should warn you of is that most everything on the calendar will appear in pop-up windows, so keep an eye on your popup blocker - that's what kept me from finding everything the first time I looked at it.

There aren't nearly as many computer desktop images, or at least there aren't yet. If you keep returning to the site you'll eventually get to see everything.

Incidentally, there are only twelve days left before they air The Runaway Bride on BBC 1.

Someone's set up a bulletin board to archive people's experiences from the Flanvention that almost wasn't.

To break up the white noise in the lab for the past couple of days, I've been listening to a couple of audio books that were recorded by the author, J.C.Hutchins collectively called 7th Son. If you're not a fan of fanfiction (which is understandable because so much of it out there is pretty bad), it's not a fanfic, it's an original work of science fiction. The premise of the story (without spoiling too much) is this: On the campaign trail, the fictional President of the United States (caveated for the Secret Service - I'm talking about someone else's work of fiction) is brutally murdered by a four year old child, who drops over dead while incarcerated a few days later. Shortly afterward, seven men around the United States with no connection to the murder or each other are ambused by MiBs who haul them away to a hidden facility in Virginia and reveal a startling secret: They are clones of a single individual and are part of a nature-or-nurture experiment designed to span their entire lives. Their memories until the age of 16 were downloaded from the brain of the original dubbed John Alpha, and uploaded into the blank brains of clones, who were then separated and carefully inserted into lives as close to that of the original as possible. Then they were allowed to diverge as they would while being monitored to see what kinds of people they would become.

While the premise of the story may not be completely new, the execution of the theme is. The main characters are not perfect copies of each other, they have unique likes, dislikes, lifestyles, and personalities, which goes to show what kind of person anyone might become if just one or two things during their early years had been different. There are also some twists to the story that give it a global feel - don't expect the story to keep going in the same direction because it'll take a twist when you least expect it. I high recommend it if you've got a portable .mp3 player, it's a good listen and a good way to kill time on your commute.

Who says that hardcopy is dead? Medical researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University have figured out a way to use inkjet printing technology to cause stem cells to differentiate in patterns. Colonies of stem cells derived from mouse muscle tissue were seeded across a scaffolding and then a modified inkjet print head was used to spray them with hormone solutions that cause them to develop into muscle and bone tissue within the patterns sprayed by the machine. The eventual goal of this project is to facilitate construction of replacement organs for surgery.

The webcomic XKCD has posted as one of its strips a map of the IPv4 address space, broken down by organisation of ownership. It's pretty interesting; I suggest that you read the weblog entry and comments because they explain how the map was generated.

If you've ever built a Windows XP machine without the benefit of a network connection to download all of the patches that have to be applied to lock it down, you know that it can be a nightmare, especially when all you have to work with is dialup, which still happens these days. Not to worry, though, the guys over at Heise Security have linked to a utility written by Torsten Whitrock of the University of Kiel called Offline Update which lets you construct your own service pack on another machine out of the patches already extant. It even includes its own batch installer, so you do not have to run each and every hotfix by hand, just like a real service pack. The utility supports Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003.

Neat: The Online Graffiti Generator.

At this particular aquarium, the sharks were definitely not at the top of the food chain.

2006/12/12

Hotmail, the webmail service that put webmail on the map (now owned by Microsoft) has increased the storage afforded to each user to one (1) gigabyte each. In other news, NetApp reports record earnings this quarter.

Scratch another pastor.

Earlier this week, one Paul Barnes, who founded the Grace Chapel church in Denver, Colorado has also resigned after admitting that he's been on the down-low.

2006/12/11

It's been a busy weekend for all of us, and yet it went by so fast we lost track of it almost as soon as it came. Jarin graduated this week from school with honours, so we invited a few folks over this weekend to celebrate. It wasn't anything big, just Jarin, the Lost Boys, Kash, and Hummingwolf with Lyssa and myself. On Saturday Lyssa and I took most of the day for ourselves and did a little running around in downtown Fairfax, Virginia. We had to pick up the ceramic work we'd done two weeks ago but had been waiting for us for about a week now, things being what they are.

As it turns out, the owner of the shoppe, an older Italian woman, recognised us immediately when we came in because we had the most unique pieces on the shelf. Lyssa's goblet turned out supurbly - the shading was smooth all the way down to the bottom of the cup, and her roses turned out beautifully. As for my own ritual coffee mug, the landscape turned out fine after firing but the inscription on the inside didn't fare quite as well. Still, the owner recognised the quote, and thanked us for coming in and treating everyone to a fun change of pace.

We wandered around downtown Fairfax for a while to see what we could find. It was very cold that day, so we didn't stay out very long, but we did find a couple of restaurants and a store or two. We wound up having lunch at a local Greek deli (the name of which escapes me at the moment, though I have one of their takeout menus at home) and then heading for home for the afternoon. I spent a good bit of it picking and cleaning up around the apartment for the people who would be coming later that night.

Lyssa started making a double-batch of Caribbean jerk chicken while I finished cleaning up around the apartment and made a last minute run to the store for ingredients. Kash was the first to arrive, followed by the Lost Boys and Jarin, with Hummingwolf rounding out the party a little bit later. We didn't actually do much on Saturday night, we just hung out watching anime (Hellsing, followed later by Trinity Blood and Bleach). I left around 2330 EST/EDT on Saturday to drive Hummingwolf back to Maryland because she wasn't feeling well and wanted to recuperate at home, and returned around 0130 EST/EDT, only to crash hard because I was exhausted.

The next morning, we got out of bed around 1000 EST/EDT and then headed for Anita's for a Tex-Mex breakfast, roughly half of which was spent shooting the bull because the place was so busy that the kitchen was running late. I don't know exactly when we finished and left, but Duo headed back to our apartment because he wasn't feeling very well. Lyssa, Kash, and I hit up Uniquity so that Lyssa could take a look at their yarn to knit gifts, but unfortunately they are closed on Sundays, and we had to decamp to Michael's instead. Once home, we basically sat around and didn't do too much.

Well, that's not exactly true. This weekend Lucien was getting slammed with SMTP traffic from most of the networks corresponding to China decided to hammer the Network late on Friday night, which drove his system load up to an average of 22.75 on the ten minute breakdown. As a stopgap I dropped more /8 networks into the tcp.smtp file and then started building a new firewall using some more recent hardware to replace Lain using OpenBSD v4.0. Jarin's not really done much with BSD, so he rode shotgun while I built a quick box on a 9.5 gig drive and plugged it into my lab network. Next up: Write packet filtering and traffic shaping rules.

Note to self: Keep an eye on this list and convert it into a set of rejection tables for BSD's packet filter.

On Sunday night, Mika and Hasufin came over and helped us put up the Yule tree in the living room. It took some doing to get into my parts bin in the closet and extract a couple of power strips, but once that was done Lyssa put in Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas and we set about assembling the artificial tree and decorating it. It really didn't take very long to get everything set up in the corner where the papasan chair used to be. All in all, I'd say that things look pretty good around the apartment; now we just have to get ready for the cookie exchange party this weekend...

In slightly dated news from last week, the US Department of Energy has announced a breakthrough in solar cell technology, vis a vis solar cells that are 40.7% efficient, standing head and shoulders over the most energy-efficient solar cells in use today, benchmarking at an average of 15%. A new generation of solar cells, called multi-junction, capture more of the sun's radient energy and convert it into a flow of usable electricity; coupled with embedded lenses that focus more light onto a smaller point, the cells can generate an even larger current.

Millimetre-wave microwave energy weapons, considered technically nonlethal, were approved for use by the US military for urban pacification.

Attention Browncoats! Firefly will return as an MMORPG, courtesy of Multiverse, who licensed the rights to the 'verse from Fox.

2006/12/10

This is the sort of thing that brings a smile to my face. In the UK, one of the BBC channels is running a reality television show to find a new model. One of the models, Jennifer Hunter, has been catching hell for being a size twelve instead of a size zero. Look, if you will, at the photograph of Ms. Hunter in a gold one-piece swimsuit. Then look at the photograph of finalist Marianne Berglund in the same swimsuit.

Go ahead, click over and take a look. I'll wait.

Now, for those of you of the appropriate persuasion, ask yourselves this: Which of the two looks more attractive? Who would you go for?

I'm not going to drop any snarky comments, nor am I going to try to change your opinions through insinuation or subtlty. What I will say is this: Women, and to a much less visible extent, men, are starving themselves to death because society tells them that they look fat when in fact, medically speaking, they are not obese; in fact, they are statistically average. Having no body fat whatsoever is not healthy, it's dangerous. Body fat protects your internal organs from damage by acting as padding. It helps regulate body temperature, also, keeping the body warm when it's cold and helping to cool it when it's hot. Adipose tissue also helps the body regulate the production of some hormones, as well as protein metabolism. Fat cells actualy produce trace amounts of estrogens, which both men and women have. Yes, I mean female hormones. Yes, I am series when I say that men have them, also - even football players, weight lifters, and wrestlers.

Anorexia is not healthy; in fact, it can be life-threatening. It can cause females to stop menstruating, skin to turn brittle, hair to call out, and joint damage because cartilage is cannibalised to keep the rest of the body fueled. Bones turn brittle, and in general the body gets run down and perpetually tired. It can even cause bodies to stop growing, developing, and healing because there just isn't enough fuel to promote growth.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with Ms. Hunter. She looks healthy, she looks happy, and she looks like a real person, and not a stick insect that's been worked over with Photoshop. She doesn't look like she's going to blow over in a stiff breeze, and she definitely doesn't look like a good hug is going to break her like a piece of kindling.

I won't pretend to speak for anyone else, but I will say that I know who I'd go for.

It really bothers me that society today has convinced people that being inherently unhealthy is a beautiful and desirable thing. There is no need to put onself at risk for long-term health problems, or even dying at a very young age simply because something who doesn't know you and has probably never met you thinks that starving yourself to the point where your body starts to cannibalise its own tissues is attractive.

It's downright dumb, people.

I know that I'm trying to talk a cyclone into putting Dorothy's house down and going away, but if there is even one person out there listen to me, please think about this: Your culture does not own your body; your culture does not dictate who you are; your culture dictates what you should look like but you do not have to follow it. It is possible to be comfortable in your own skin, no matter what you look like, and that is the most beautiful thing of all. At some point you have to stop listening to what They tell you and decide for yourself what you're comfortable with, and how you want to look. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, don't hurt yourselves over this. Don't starve yourselves. Don't listen to the myriad of communities on Tribe, Livejournal, Blogger, MySpace, or what have you that tell you that being anorexic or bulemic is a wonderful thing and help you go about it. That makes about as much sense as putting arsenic in your coffee every day for flavour or powdering your face with lead compounds for beauty: It'll only wreck your health and, if you push it too far, kill you.

2006/12/09

So, they cancelled the Flanvention in California and half the cast of Firefly showed up anyway!

Uh-oh. Busted.

Note to self: Rematerialise next to the Reflecting Pool, not over it.

2006/12/08

The past week or so has been very hectic for me because I've had yet another project in the works which took quite a bit of preparation and research. A colleague of mine at work teaches a class at George Mason University on cryptography and security methodologies, and he asked my boss and I if we'd do a guest class for him (which was last night after being rescheduled last week) on our respective fields of practice. My boss did a presentation on PKI, public key infrastructure, which you've probably used in some way without realising it. PKI is the technology that underlies the cryptographic systems that protect much of the e-commerce traffic from the Web these days. In essence, some large corporation out there decides to set itself up as a CA (Certification Authority) and sign cryptographic certificates that other (usually smaller) companies purchase to use to encrypt traffic. The idea is that your web browser looks as the cert offered by, for example, Amazon and verifies the digital signature on it. The browser can then follow the chain of signatures all the way up to the top-level CA, which is explicitly trusted.

In a nutshell, if live.com's cert says that it is trusted and signed by Microsoft, and Microsoft's signing certificate is trusted by the Digital Signature Trust Company (I don't know who actually signed it, I don't have any records on that cert), and the DSTC is considered a top-level ultimately trusted CA, then you know that Someone Important trusts live.com enough to sign their cert, so you can trust that anything you do with them is encrypted with a cert that you can trust. It's sort of like getting your boss to sign a document that attests that the consultant you just hired won't post the results of the security audit on Slashdot.

Okay, so maybe that's a tortured example. I could go on and on about crypto, digital signatures, and suchlike but that would require a book, and there are a few books on the market that do a much better job than I could. For our purposes, it has to do with mathematically assigning and verifying trust.

My presentation was the second half of the class, and involved wireless network security, namely, why WEP can't be trusted, what other kinds of attacks can be used to not only interfere with wireless networks but assist in compromising the security of a wireless network, and what kind of mitigating strategies can be implemented in case replacing the wireless infrastructure of $ORGANISATION isn't a viable alternative.

For the past week or so I've been inhaling everything I could get my hands on to get back up to speed on wireless networking (because I haven't done anything serious with it since 2004). I've also been doing a lot of experimenting at home with my wireless network, some war-walking, monitoring RF traffic around my apartment, testing various tools on packet captures, and suchlike. True to form, on Wednesday night I turned my notes into a Powerpoint presentation (well, actually an Impress presentation using OpenOffice.org) and ran through my presentation before going to bed. On Thursday I got an e-mail from P-, who asked me to convert it into a true Powerpoint presentation (easy enough using OO.o) and put it into an approved presentation format (which involved re-doing the entire thing with a different graphic template).

After dropping Lyssa off at the doctor's office yesterday I had a few hours to kill so I hit the local non-Starbucks coffeeshop to get a hot one and do a little packet monitoring while I re-typed the whole shebang. I still had plenty of time to get other writing in once that was finished, proofread, and spell checked.

Actually getting to GMU was complicated by rush-hour traffic in DC. Just getting off of the ramp and onto the highway proper took thirty minutes; total travel time was about ninety minutes to go twenty miles in more or less a straight shot.

Frankly, I'm quite surprised that Luel worked so well with the VGA projectors set up in the classroom, especially because he's got an unusual screen resolution (1280x800, technically a widescreen mode) but neither am I arguing. P- and I walked in, set up, and got everything powered on in very little time indeed. I fired up a couple of demo apps, tested the presentation one last time (one never knows, especially when the Powerpoint file format is in use), and sat back to wait for class to start.

I got off to a rough start: I'm not very good at talking in front of people. Once I forced myself to slow down and use the points in the presentation as anchors to elaborate upon, though, things went much more smoothly. Thankfully the students had already been through a course on cryptography, so I didn't have to stop and explain things in mid-stride. I managed to hit almost everything I had intended and demo'd a couple of applications, but unfortunately my hour was up before I could get to risk mitigation strategies. Amazingly, there were a few people who took notes the entire time; I'm very pleased by this.

Sadly, my copy of Driftnet didn't catch anyone surfing during class. On second thought, I'm kind of relieved. I know the kind of things I do to mess with the heads of people who watch for users who aren't paying attention with Driftnet, and my laptop was hooked up to a classroom projector, after all...

I didn't expect us to get applause when we were done. P- and I were a hit with the students.

I wound up staying after class talking with some of the students who had questions about the implementation of the RC-4 algorithm in WEP and how the known-plaintext attack works as well as what sort of research I do and how I originally got into infosec. I was very pleased to see interest from students above and beyond the presentation, and I think I left a good impression on them.

I'll put the presentation up later tonight.

I love fans, in particular FF7 fans. Someone did an impressive analysis of Cloud Strife's sword to show how it works. Nevermind the fact that such a weapon is practically impossible to construct in a feasible way, let alone balanced to use as an effective weapon.

I just woke up from a post-work nap.

While asleep, I had an interesting discussion with a dream-avatar of Jim Butcher about copyright law.

That is all.

This gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside - A grove of druids adopted the highway the runs past Jerry Fallwell's church.

I feel like I just ate a puppy.

Handpuppet Theatres does Serenity. (warning: spoilers, truncated as they may be!)

2006/12/07

For the first time in a while, I'm working from home today. Lyssa had a doctor's appointment this afternoon and I offered to drive her in a couple of days ago. It's no big deal, really, because I can do most of what I need from my laptop without any trouble. Give me a text editor and I will change the world...

In the past few years, the conservative regeime in control of the United States government has been keeping Mary Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney under wraps because she is openly a lesbian. Moreover, she's Dick Cheney's chief political advisor - this no doubt gives quite a few folks downtown the heebie jeebies. That said, I'm very surprised that this news article hit the NY Daily News this morning: Mary Cheney's expecting; her partner of 15 years is overjoyed with this development. Ironically, Heather Poe and Cheney live in the state of Virginia, which passed a constitutional amendment in November that bans same-sex marriages, which means that the child will have none of usual privileges and protections of other children, such as having her other mother sign forms in school and visit in the hospital.

On a personal note, I raise my middle finger in the direction of on Carrie Earll of Focus on the Family, who was quoted as saying that "Love can't replace a mom or a dad."

Those of us who come from single-parent households beg to differ.

Today marks what could be the final Pearl Harbor veteran reunion in history. Sixty-five years ago, the base at Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, which spurred the United States into entering World War II. However, time and entropy have taken their toll upon the survivors, as it does to us all, and there are few veterans left, and fewer who can make the journey to Hawaii. Those that made it to the roll call will probably be remembered as the last of their kind.

Arlen Specter, amazingly, is trying to do something good for a change: He's initiated a bill (S.4081) that will restore habeas corpus to 'enemy combatants' detained by the US.

2006/12/06

For those of you who have a little mystery in them, there is now a company called Hidden Passageway, who will design and construct hidden rooms and passageways for your domicile. They will build sliding bookcases, rotating fireplaces, descending easy chairs, and other secret structures, complete with custom-designed access mechanisms (such as the traditional "pull the false book on the shelf to open the hidden door"). They claim that their hidden structures are designed with security in mind, and will work with you to implement suitable security and access control measures, including iris scanners and fingerprint readers (neither of which are particularly cheap). They have a full catalogue online, but their prices are definitely nontrivial: Their work starts at $1900us (for a false staircase) and ranges all the way up to $24kus for a chamber or hallway hidden behind an 80"x30" painting or mirror.

One thing that you have to bear in mind is the fact that your house must already have room to spare - they're not going to put an addition onto your house, because then everyone will know that something is up. What they will do is partition off some space from an already existing room (like a study or living room), build a wall that matches the rest of the room in front of it, and work the hidden door into the new wall. If you know what you're looking for and are careful you can figure out that some space is missing, but most people won't think to do so (because, after all, who builds hidden chambers in their homes ala Bruce Wayne?).

Printing system: lpr-ng. Time to configure: Four hours.

Printing system: CUPS. Time to configure: Sixty seconds.

Suck it, BSD!

I've been doing a bit of experimentation on my laptop lately and I'm coming closer to a decision insofar as setting up a weblogging system is concerned. I'm thinking about setting up Nanoblogger to serve as the engine behind my memory logs. It's a nifty system that's written as a series of Bash shellscripts. The idea is that you write entries using a regular text editor (as I do now) and when you save them it converts everything into HTML, sets up permalinks and categories (which I'm going to start using), and plugs everything into an archive system. It uses flat text files to store entries, which I think is ideal (call me old-fashioned, but I don't know enough about database systems to use them safely, let alone usefully) and it minimises the number of moving parts. It also has documentation for writing scripts that'll convert entries from one format (flat HTML, for the sake of argument) into Nanoblogger's internal format. It does RSS and ATOM feeds natively, which is a feature that I was looking for. It doesn't do comments by itself, though, but I've got a couple of add-ons for Nanoblogger that implement this lined up that I'll be testing.

Now I just need to figure out how the hell CSS works and make it fit into the rest of my site...

As if that wasn't enough to get my attention, there is a facility for writing entries offline (make a copy of the entry template and write your entry), uploading them, and inserting them into the entry archive. When I'm on the road I do this, anyway. There is, however, a feature that will let you configure an arbitrary command (like SCP) that will upload the converted weblog entry to the server in question and insert it. I will definitely make use of this if I can while I'm out and about...

I've also got an idea for a Perl script that periodically logs into a POP3 mail server, checks for new messages to a certain account, and if it finds any runs them through the Nanoblogger utility which converts and inserts them. Even if I can't SSH out, I'll still be able to post updates.

After a bit of digging around in the docs, I discovered that there is even a way to embed it in another website, which I'll definitely be making use of. I spent some time hacking around with the templates this afternoon but I wasn't able to make it do what I wanted. The embed-in-site page (scroll down a bit) will more than suffice.

Ye gods, look at me... I'm getting geek wood over a weblogging system. Next thing you know I'll have a MySpace account and be sipping chianti with the staff of Wired.

I might be a computer geek, but I tend to like things simple. When I was younger and had more time on my hands (as well as less professional experience) I had no problem with having a very baroque setup for, well, just about anything. I liked complexity; still do, under certain circumstances. But I also have a life and other things to do. I also know my limitations: I'm not a web guy, I'm an OS guy. There are scads of remote exploits inherent to poor web software design out there, and at this point in time I'm not good enough to keep up with them. I'm also not a strong web coder: I know a handful of HTML commands (if you read my memory logs you've seen them all) and one or two PHP functions. Certainly not enough to design a web application that anyone could safely use unless it was on a web server that wasn't exposed to the Net.

I'm looking for a system that I can set up and use without much of a learning curve in a reasonably secure manner. Generating the HTML code offline and uploading it in a static manner suits me just fine. I don't need web apps for everything else, at least not yet, because I've already got a photo album, a library, et cetera, et cetera. If I need something else I'll set it up, but for now I have what I need.

I just need something simple that I can mess around with when I have a moment to spare (like right now).

Second Reality has its own Wikipedia entry?!?

2006/12/05

The Russian Confederation is closing ranks in response to the deathbed words of assassinated ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko - assuming that they find the assassin or assassins, the parties in question would not be extradited to the UK for murder.

The California state government was about to pass a bill that would make it illegal to obtain information by pretexting, pretending to be someone else in order to conceal one's identity. Just before the bill was passed into law the state government came under fire from the Motion Picture Association of America to spike the bill because they said that it would cut into their business practices.

They killed bill SB1666 and replaced it with one that only makes it illegal to misrepresent oneself to get hold of telephone records.

echo "# joe jobbers can blow me" > ~alias/.qmail-default - when you absolutely, positively don't understand why a bounce message gets you on a realtime antispam blacklist.

Last night after work Lyssa and I drove over to Borders to hang out, rather than go straight home or to the grocery store (which we probably should have done). She's been looking for a number of books lately, the nature of which I did not know of. As it turns out, while I was drinking coffee and reading manga in the cafe' next to gentleman who held a very animated conversation with no one in particular (he wasn't wearing a headset of any kind, I surreptitiously checked) she was tracking down some books on the Russian language and picked out a basic text and a kit that included a number of audio CDs, a textbook, a traveller's quick reference, and a bidirectional lexicon. Afterward we stopped off at home for a bit and then set out for the Silver Diner for dinner because neither of us particularly relished what we had in the fridge (which seems to be a problem lately).

The Silver Diner's service has gotten noticably better in the months since we gave up in disgust on them. The food's not too bad, either - it's diner fare, so you get what you pay for. I thought my grilled chicken sandwich a bit on the greasy side (note to self: next time skip the cheese as well as the sautee'd mushrooms) but otherwise everything, including the chocolate-strawberry milkshake we split between us was very tasty.

I'm seriously considering setting up a real weblogging system for my website after last night. I've been doing a lot of writing in various media for a while now and my notes probably aren't worth adding to a general journal like this because there's no way to really organise things or put them behind cuts. I pondered setting up another flat memory log for that research but that means more files that I have to juggle. So.. I'm looking to replace my memory logs with something more dynamic. I'd also like to add an RSS feed so that I can get more exposure among weblogs, and maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment but I'd like to set up comments of a sort so I can communicate more directly with people.

What I'm looking for is something that I can plug right into my existing web site so I won't have to scrap everything and start over. If I can disable the usual leftmost and rightmost bars of options I would like to do so; or if I can add links to those pages I can then ditch the menu in the leftmost frame. Either way, there's a lot of work that I'd really like to not see go to waste.

If I go to a system that uses a database to hold the entries, I'll have to write a Perl script that translates all of the older entries and plugs them into the necessary tables. It'll be a bit of a pain but it can be done.

Neat! Carved crayons!

2006/12/04

To whomever it was that left the message for me in my webserver's error logs: Nice going.

The professionally paranoid should sit up and take notice because it's been confirmed that cellular telephones may be remotely activated to monitor their surroundings, much like infinity bugs attached to hardwired telephones are capable of. The infosec community first discovered this back in 1999, but this is the first time that it's ever gotten out. The FBI calls this the 'roving bug' technique, and essentially it means that someone at a cell company connects to a phone and activates the microphone. The DOJ first signed off on this when they were investigating the Genevese family because the bigwigs in the Family were too paranoid for surveillance to really be effective. The press release interestingly states that many models of cellphone can't be powered down completely unless the batteries are removed. It is said that Nextel, Samsung, and one particular model of Motorola phone (the Razr) may have their firmware updated remotely to implement such functionality. Lauren Weinstein has posted to his weblog (yes, the pronoun is correct) about how to tell if your phone is being used as an infinity bug - basically, if it's transmitting when you aren't talking on the phone, something's fishy.

In the United States, cellular telephone towers broadcast to phones between the frequencies of 869.040 to 893.970 MHz, and cellphones transmit back to the repeaters between the frequencies of 824.040 to 848.970 MHz. If you know one in use, you can either add 45 MHz (to get the tower frequency) or subtract 45 MHz (to get the frequency in use by the phone) for the purposes of monitoring. At least, those are the rules for certain kinds of phones - there are a few different kinds of cellphone out there that use different sets of frequencies - do your homework.

Now, it's illegal to listen in on cellphone traffic in the US, but you don't need to listen in to know that a phone is doing something, all you need is a frequency counter that can pick up activity on those frequencies and tell you if a phone is transmitting or not when you haven't actually placed a call.

The body account associated with now-deceased ex-Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko continues to climb as associates of his are now known to be poisoned in exactly the same way. Mario Scaramella, an academic who is a national of Italy was diagnosed as having been poisoned with a radioisotope of Polonium as well. As if that weren't enough, governments around the world are discovering signs of radio-Polonium contamination in a dozen other buildings in the UK and on no fewer than five transoceanic jetliners. Nobody knows if Scaramella is going to survive yet. The final results of the autopsy on Litvinenko have not yet been released.

As it turns out, Scaramella was one of Litvinenko's contacts from his days in the cold war. After tests were run, it was determined that Scaramella recieved a much smaller dose of the radioactive compound than his associate had, but he's not out of the woods just yet. They met at a sushi bar in London, England to discuss a list of political critics inside the Russian Confederation who either had been killed or were thought to be a threat. Supposedly, Scaramella had hard information pertaining to a shipment of weapons that will be used as part of an assassination attempt in Italy in the near future, police found out, and then all hell broke loose.

When did we return to the 1980's, and why aren't the television shows any better?

This weekend was a strange one. Lyssa and I had pretty much run ourselves into the ground and wanted time to recuperate. Lyssa went to bed early on Friday night to catch up on her sleep while I played around a bit with the Children. On Saturday morning we got an emergency load of laundry done, amidst a bit of miscommunication, and then set out for lunch at Over the Border and then spent a couple of hours at Borders nosing the stacks. Somehow, and I'm not entirely sure how, we managed to lose about three hours of time, much more than normal because we didn't actually buy anything. Originally, I'd gone to do a little Yule shopping but I didn't find anything that seemed to fit as a gift. Both of us were surprised when we found out how much time had passed - it felt like very little.

We wound up sitting around that evening watching the first DVD of the first season of Forver Knight, which I'd gotten as a gift a couple of years ago but never had the opportunity to sit down and watch (like most media in my library), even though it was one of my favourite shows when it was airing (at 0400 EST/EDT on CBS in Pittsburgh).

If you've never seen Forever Knight before (even though it's on the Sci-Fi channel in syndication), it practically created the genre of "angsty vampire trying to become human again, and do some good along the way". As cliche' as it sounds today (especially to jaded gamers) back then it was pretty rare, outside of Anne Rice's novels. It pretty much put Geraint Wyn-Davies on the map in television, along with Nigel Bennet. I won't rant about it because I wouldn't want to bore anyone, but if you're interested you can find more information with a couple of Google searches.

Later in the evening, Lyssa recieved an emergency communique' from Raven, a friend of ours who lives not too far away. She'd been having problems with her computer lately, which has kept her offline, and she was wondering if I'd take a look at it. That wasn't a problem, because Lyssa and I were going out to run a late-night errand to CVS anyway, so we swung past her place and picked her up along with her incredibly AMD 64-bit machine in a shoebox-sized chassis.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to get the chassis open, but thankfully it involved neither lots of rusty chains tipped with hooks nor having any skin traumatically removed from my person. As it turns out, the after market nVidia graphics card had gone bad, probably due to a bad fan (which came apart in my hands), but there was another built into the mainboard that she can use until she gets her hands on a replacement. All in all, we stayed up until 0400 or so talking once I resurrected her machine.

Lyssa and I slept until noon on Sunday, and spent most of the day recovering from such a late night. I did some running around to get groceries, pick up her prescription, and get a couple of things for work, and then came home to spend the rest of the night with Lyssa. We sat around watching the Food Network last night and relaxing.

Okay, I'm an unrepentant Iron Chef fan. I like both the original and the American variants, though I much prefer the original. I will say, however, that seeing the challenger bring a three-gallon dewar flask of liquid nitrogen with him to make ice cream gave me a geekgasm.

2006/12/01

An information security company based out of Israel called ARX has published a paper on cracking the security of ATM (automated teller machine) networks (mirrored here, just in case) in which the PINs of credit and debit cards can be captured in plaintext form. Copying the magnetic strips of credit cards is a known technology - carders have been doing it since the 1980's, but without the PIN you can't put a duplicate card into an ATM and withdraw cash from the associated account, you can only use the credit card number, name, and expiration date to order things. ATMs connect through a packet switched network to communicate with their home banks; a lot, if not most ATMs these days have built-in modems that dial out (when last I checked, they connected at 2400 bps) to a system somewhere on the POTS network, and then do their thing. Before any data is transmitted the ATMs encrypt the PIN with the 3DES algorithm and three different 56-bit (7 bytes) keys for safety.

The problem is that each communique' has to pass through a number of other systems (referred to as switches in the whitepaper), where the PIN block is decrypted, verified, and re-encrypted with a different set of keys. A hardware security module is used to perform these operations, instead of software running inside a general-purpose computer. HSMs, to be worthy of the term, tend to have some pretty hefty requirements that have to be met, but they are not invulnerable. An attacker has to be at the console of one of the switches that make up the communications network (hardware consoles can be hooked up to concentrators that are themselves plugged into a mangement network and their security isn't always up to snuff, it should be noted) or inside the bank's data verification itself, but insider attacks are not unknown. The protocols underlying the Financial PIN Processing API itself are used in the attack.

One of the operations implemented by the FPINPA translates PIN blocks into different formats so that they may be retransmitted to other processing systems. This inherently involves decrypting and re-encrypting the PIN blocks.. A PIN block is converted into a format called ISO-1 (if it isn't already) and then into the ISO-0 format with an account number of the attacker's choosing. All the preprocessing before the attack can take place is done to build a table of encrypted PINs coupled with a certain account number (there are 10,000 possible four-digit PINs) and we've got a cyphertext rainbow table attack against the PIN primed and ready to go.

It'll take me a couple of pages to describe the math behind it but it's all in the whitepaper. Suffice it to say that manipulating individual bits can be an excellent way to speed up many mathematical operations, including cryptography and cryptanalysis. I'll cut to the chase and state that Russian organised crime is supposedly making active use of this vulnerability in the banking system, and lookup tables of the encrypted PINs are being sold on the black market at this time. I will also say that bank networks have been cracked in the past (Citibank's business net was compromised back in the late 1980's by way of an X.25 network) so it's entirely possible.

And next, meet a women who claims she's taught her duck to tap-dance.

No, not really. US.gov is warning banks to watch their backs because Al Quaida is going to attack their websites.

Where's the Tylenol?

A while ago I started keeping an eye on the plight of Chris Soghoian, who was paid a visit by the MiBs for documenting a vulnerabilty in the US airline boarding pass system which the authorities have been ignoring ever since a US senator first pointed it out. On Tuesday they dropped the case against him because they determined that he had no malicious intent. There is more information here, on Chris' weblog about the situation. Unusually, they gave all of his hardware back, which doesn't happen often. He also wrote that the FBI agents he'd been talking to had some.. interesting.. opinions of information security, privacy, and encryption research, and that at least some aspects of US.gov don't like Tor (even though it was a project originally started by the Navy).

Moreover, they still haven't addressed the original vulnerability!

2006/11/30

If you've read my memory logs for a while, you probably remember when the Lyons Partnership came after me for a picture of a Barney pinata. I'm not unique in this: These guys have a reputation for rattling their legal sabres in the direction of anyone who uses the Annoying Purple Dinosaur for any reason, even the ones permitted by US Copyright Law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took up the case of Dr. Stuart Frankel, who came under fire for a Barney parody website and won in court against the Lyons Partnership.

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has appeared in the news after a major faux pas at the yearly Nackey S. Loeb Awards Dinner when he spoke out against the First Amendment and brought in the First Horseman of the Infocalypse. He said that the people of the United States would have to re-evaluate ther freedom of speech in light of the fact that terrorists use the Internet. He neglected to say that they would also have to re-evaluate the use of printing presses, because terrorists also print things on dead trees, the use of spoken language because terrorists use their voices to speak to other people, and the right to get together for dinner because terrorists gather in small groups.

The Week of Oracle Bugs, announced by Argeniss Security has been cancelled for unannounced reasons.

The US government is trying to make it harder for Kim Jong-Il, president of North Korea to get his hands on such luxury items as iPods, Segways, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Sure. That'll teach him not to fund a nuclear weapons programme... that's like sending a kid to his or her room these days as punishment.

Here's a pleasant afternoon's diversion for you:

Look at the robots.txt files for various websites. According to spec, search engines and webspiders aren't supposed to index any pages that are listed in the robots.txt file on any websites. Of course, there are quite a few fly by night search engines out there who don't follow this spec, but many do.

They're a good way to find content that you're not expecting on a website. All you have to do is key the base URL into your browser (say, www.google.com) and then append of the directories from the robots.txt file (for example, here's Google's). There are other sites out there that have just as interesting things.. I'll leave it to you to think of them.

Here's one that I don't think the author will mind me linking to: Someone hid their weblog in the site's robots.txt file.

First levitation(!), then a screwdriver...

2006/11/29

Last night after work, Lyssa and I decided to head back to Tyson's Corner Mall for dinner and a little wandering around for no good reason. We wound up killing time at Barnes and Noble for a while until the rush hour/dinnertime crowd thinned out a little, and then walked over to the Gordon Biersch Brewery (7861-L Chain Bridge Road; McLean, Virginia; 22102; phone 703-388-5454; Tyson's Corner Mall, bottom floor, all the way to the back near Barnes and Noble), which we've been checking out for a while but hadn't yet tried. En route, we discovered that Pauli Moto's Asian Bistro had closed its doors, and the floor space out front was slowly being converted into a lounge for weary power shoppers by mall management.

Gordon Biersch is one of those trendy grill restaurants with its own micro brewery upstairs that seem to be popping up all over the place in recent years. Lyssa and I didn't take them up on their beer sampler (five shotglasses of their in-house brews for free) because both of us were working on empty stomachs, and really wanted real food. That said, their calamari is tasty, cut into bite sized chunks, and not rubbery at all, which are all good things for squid. I ordered the hummus salad for an appetizer, Lyssa the wedge salad. The hummus salad was very good - it had a delicate flavour, a lot of shredded cheese (which I didn't expect), and some very good pita bread. It was well worth the money spent on it. I don't know offhand what Lyssa thought of the wedge salad, so I'll probably update that point later. I ordered the barbecued chicken sandwich for my entree, and Lyssa got the sauteed mushroom hamburger for her order. I was very pleased with the chicken sandwich: It had been grilled until just done and the barbecue sauce was sparingly used and not overwhelming in flavour. The garlic fries were a nice touch, I thought. Lyssa wasn't too impressed with her hamburger, in fact it left her feeling ill when everything was said and done.

I was pleased with the attentiveness and helpfulness of the waitstaff, even during a busy time of night on a weekday. Expect to pay about $50us for two people while you're there.

I'd give Gordon Biersch.. let me see... two flareguns. I was pleased with my meal (even thought I couldn't finish it - my stomach was full well before the end of our meeal) and the service was good. Lyssa was neither impressed nor feeling well afterward, so I have to take that into account. Everything added up, you might want to check it out if you're in the area, but there are probably other places at the mall that you'd like better, especially if high fat foods aren't your bag.

Don't they have anything better to do than arrest zombies at a party? Now granted, I'm not too big on this whole zombie fad in US pop culture these days, but this is just absurd, even by my standards.

As if that weren't fucked up enough, the Bloomington, Minnesota police force mistook a temperature sensor accidentally left in the trunk of a rental car for a bomb of some kind and blew it up, which detaining Dr. Anne Jefferson and her husband at the airport. The article mentions later on (near the end, in fact) that the rental car in question was one-half mile away from the perimeter of the airport when they freaked out.

I can sort of understand their concern, because not everyone is a science geek and knows what a Stowaway Temperature Tidbit Logger is, but it was nowhere near close enough to the airport to do any damage even if it had been a bomb.

Duct tape, for the win.

2006/11/28

Today marks the third or fourth straight day of unusual temperatures in the DC metropolitan area in particular, and in West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania in general. So the news report say, the low temperatures have been around 33 degrees Farenheit or so in the mornings, but in practice it's been reasonably warm for late November and very comfortable. Over Thanksgiving weekend, there were folks in shorts and t-shirts putting up Yule decorations outside in West Virginia...

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I much prefer sort-of-but-not-quite-warm to holy-shit-it's-cold in any event.

What the...? Somebody stripped Sky-Runner!

I've got something of a dilemma going on, and I'd like to open the floor for suggestions from my readers.

As you've no doubt determined, I'm a flaming geek. I derive great pleasure from hacking around with software, hardware, and information in general. I'm also very fond of writing, and have a number of projects going on at this time, as well as not a few modifications to this website planned (the least of which is implementing a comment system for individual posts). I also have a significant other, one Lyssa Heartsong, whom I love very much. I also have a job that requires me to make certain educational advancements to keep up with the projects I'm working on. I work as a system admin, so this is par for the course. I'm also trying to start a programme of self-improvement, including physical as well as mental exercise to keep myself sharp.

Here's my question: How do I juggle all of this?

How can I 0) spend quality time with my SO, thus making her happy, 1) spend quality time with my tech, thus making me happy, 2) work on the books I'm researching and writing (with the intent to publish, mind you), 3) maintain the servers in my lab that provide publically accessible services (and a couple of private services on the lab network), 4) work on my certifications (CISSP at the moment), and 5) get into better shape and feel better?

The reasons I've thrown this open is because I honestly don't know, and I'm trying to get more input on the matter. I've tried everything I can to come up with a life-pattern that will let me do everything I enjoy and look forward to as well as keep everyone else happy and nothing is really workingi the way I'd hoped. The way things are arranged now, there is an inverse relationship between my stuff and everyone else's stuff (I'm grossly overgeneralising here), and my natural proclivities just don't work when you add an SO to the mix (which is to say, concentrating on self-improvement and minimising outside contact until I've made a decent amount of progress).

I've also thrown this open to the Net at large because I'm planning to write an essay on this phenomenon and it's part of my research. Proper credit will be given, anonymity will of course be respected.

So.. geeks, hackers, programmers, and what-have-you, I ask you this: How the hell do you manage it? Please e-mail me with your suggestions and comments.

The Chicago Sun-Times has had a week to play with Microsoft's new portable media player, the Zune, and they're calling it the pants. The support software installer doesn't work the way it's supposed to, it isn't compatible with any of the files handled by Windows Media Player (which includes music that you've used it to rip from your own CDs), the Zune software is the only software that can be used to get any media onto the unit (see problem #1), and it doesn't support podcasts. Also, any media that you install on the Zune (including freely downloaded podcasts) are infected with DRM such that the track will no longer be playable after three playbacks or three calendar days, whichever comes first.

There are so many other .mp3 players out there that aren't crippled, can store more data than the Zune, and cost less, I don't think that I even have to list any of them.

But.. if you've been shackled with one of these white elephants there's a way to break the DRM inherent in the Zune so that you can regain control of your media.

Ohhh... a head-mounted display built into a pair of mirrorshades.. only $400us.. and they're a style I like wearing..

2006/11/27

Washington, DC: The only city in the known universe in which a man with an iPod cranked up so loud that I could hear it ten feet away in the heart of the city can walk against the red across a busy street, almost get hit by a car because a) he was jaywalking, and b) wasn't paying attention, and have the gall to turn around and curse at the driver who nearly ran him down.

I love this city.

Speaking of cities.. first it was security cameras all over the UK. Then they added loudspeakers. Now they're adding microphones to them, so that they can monitor sound as well as video. The mikes are reportedly good out to 100 meters and are hooked to some sort of pattern recognition system which can detect signs of aggressive behaviour, including shouting, excessive volume, and a couple of different accoustic signs of shouting.

What's next?

How about someone saving life and limb by cancelling the remake of Revenge of the Nerds? After two weeks of shooting at Emory University, the college backed out of the deal, which puts the movie in limbo.

Corpse graffiti in MMORPGs.

2006/11/25

The madness seems to be over. Lyssa and I got up around 0700 EST/EDT yesterday morning to brave the crowds that would surely be out on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year (though certainly not the worst; that dubious honour is held to this day by the day immediately before Christmas). People were already lining up outside of the malls for the special sales, I am told by reliable sources (namely, the Ferrett and Gini, who arrived at their mall at 0220 EST/EDT, drove around the block to kill time for a while, and found over one hundred people camped out at 0240 EST/EDT, thus squeezing them out) at insane times. We left shortly before 0800 EST/EDT to pick up Hasufin, who would be riding shotgun with us, and then drove to the Tyson's Corner Mall, which is like a tiny slice of Manhattan in northern Virginia. It didn't take us very long to find parking through a stroke of luck - a spot opened near the building as we picked our way through the parking lot.

Tyson's Corner was packed shoulder to shoulder with people looking to drop a lot of money wherever they could to get a jumpstart on their Yule shopping this year. The aisles were three and four deep with people hunting down gifts and suchlike... I did manage to get a few things for folks during the couple of hours that we were there, though it proved to be a serious navigational challenge because I haven't yet figured out how to walk through people. At one point I thought it migh be a good idea to walk down to Starbuck's to get a few copies of the Washington Post to cut up for coupons. As it turned out, the coupons for Macy's were good for really only one thing: Unbranded clothing for either sex. Not accoutrements like cufflinks or watches. Not name-brand clothing. Not housewares. Not even makeup.

I'll leave it to you to deduce what I was there shopping for. Suffice it to say, I wasted a good bit of time getting those coupons.

I had better luck elsewhere in the mall, all things considered. Even though the mall was packed with people, the individual stores kept the shelves stocked to handle all of the customers. One notable exception was EB Games, which was full of fans (and parents thereof) fighting over Xbox 360 games. Neither Lyssa, Hasufin, or myself could get anywhere near there.

We returned home shortly before 1200 EST/EDT to pick up Hummingwolf, who had crashed out to get more rest rather than attempt to brave the crowds with us, and then set forth for Anita's for a lunch that didn't involve turkey or stuffing.

After lunch, Hasufin and I dropped the others off and went over to Micro Center to get a bit more shopping in. Micro Center was a bit less packed with people, but was just as well resupplied when it counted most.

The evening was spent lounging around after Rialian came over and watching 80's movies, vis a vis Ghostbusters, which Hummingwolf had not yet seen. Rialian's been fighting with a PCMCIA wireless network card on his laptop, which I took a crack at because I've been working on a driver for it in my spare time. All I can say is this: Whomever made it impossible, for all intents and purposes, to get one's hands on the documentation for that particular chipset needs to arm wrestle a bandsaw. I'm getting really tired of picking apart entirely different firmware images with a hex editor for each incremental revision of this bloody chipset.

I advised Rialian to buy a USB or another PCMCIA wireless adapter.

Today, Lyssa and I dropped Hummingwolf off at the Metro station and then set out to find a place in downtown Fairfax, Virginia at which you can paint your own ceramic pieces and have them fired. It's something that Lyssa's been interested in for a while, and I haven't done anything with ceramics for years, so... finding the place was pretty easy, it's in northern Virginia a hop, a skip, and a jump away from the beltway. Leave it to us to be the oddballs who choose chalices to paint.. well, Lyssa chose a chalice to decorate. I picked the largest coffee mug that I could find. While Lyssa went with a hand-painted pattern of roses, I painted a freehand landscape over the sides of the bug, ending with a starscape at the very top, and inside the mug itself, along with a quote from a poem that I loved when I was younger.

When we pick them up after they're fired, I'll put up some photographs.

I think more than the patient in question needs their head examined: One Daniel Beloungea of Oakland, California was taking his daily constitutional as part of his physical therapy reigmen following brain surgery, and suffered a complex partial seizure, which drew the attention of authorities, who arrested him for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The seizure was interpreted as resisting arrest, so Beloungea was handcuffed, hit with a baton, and hit with a stungun while seizing.

The hell of it is, it's National Epilepsy Month. Thanks and headslaps to Hummingwolf, who pointed this legal idiocy out to me over coffee this morning. I thought the legal ramifications of seizure activity had been worked out in the 1960's...

More information on the different types of seizures and how to handle them can be read here. I recommend that everyone read it at least once, just in case.

I've been following the case of ex-KGB spook Alexander Litvinenko in the UK since it came out that someone poisoned him with what they thought was thallium. Litvinenko died on Friday shortly after spilling his guts to British intelligence about the political situation in the Russian Confederation. An autopsy showed that Litvinenko had toxic levels of a radioisotope of the element polonium in his system, and apparently died from radiation poisoning before the polonium could disrupt his cytochemistry to a lethal extent.

It should be noted that the Russian stasi once used radioisotopes of scandium to assassinate political dissidents, so this isn't as odd a tactic as it might sound.

2006/11/23

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Lots of stuff to do over here, so not much writing is getting done.

Well, the madness thus far is over, and I think I've awakened from the tryptophan coma that comes bundled with every turkey at this time of year.

This week has been rough, let me be honest. Lyssa and I have been getting ready for Thanksgiving, including lots of cleaning, a good bit of cooking, and a lot of running around DC to buy stuff. Last night was a nightmare when it came to driving around to buy stuff, let me be clear. It was dark; it was raining hard enough to make it difficult to not only see but maneuver as well; it was also as cold outside as a sperm bank's vault, and certainly not as fun. Everyone and their backup was out and about last night, fighting over the last of everything at the supermarket. Turkey genocide is over - the bipedal ape and reptile descendents won another year in a row.

Lyssa started cooking last night after we got home. Thanksgiving is always a major holiday, and when you're having company over (vis a vis Grant and Hummingwolf), that means one thing: A lot of food. Stuffing. Cranberry salad. Prepping a might-be-partially-frozen-but-we're-not-really-sure turkey to go into the oven at 0-dark-00 on Thanksgiving Day. This also meant more cleaning. The division of labour was obvious: I cleaned, Lyssa cooked. It really bothers me to cook as little as I do, but if things are going to get done, the labor has to be divvied up somehow.

I finally went to bed around 0200 EST/EDT today, after doing three loads of laundry, watching the one and only episode of Global Frequency that I'd gotten my hands on over a year ago, and periodically rotating the turkey she'd left thawing in the sink end over end so that everything had a chance to gently warm to the point where water would melt back into ice, so that it could be cooked properly later today.

When you realise that you've got a narration running in your head similiar to that of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it's time to go to sleep.

This morning I was awakened at 0830 EST/EDT by Lyssa, who was busily trying to maneuver the turkey into a position where it could be cleaned out and stuffed. It took two of us to manhandle it into a baking bag and into the baking pan (with rack) for deposition into the oven. The day started off from there, as one would imagine.. everything was cleaned up and ready to go, it was a matter of getting the food ready and on the table. That's actually not all that interesting to tell; if you've helped with Thanksgiving at home, you have an idea of how it went.

The four of us wound up eating Thanksgiving dinner around 1430 EST/EDT this afternoon. We had a fantastic assortment of foods to choose from, apart from the eighteen pound turkey. There was stuffing, two variants of sweet potatoes (sweet and savory), cranberry salad, green bean salad with french-fried onions (which really are tasty, much to my surprise), rolls, mashed potatoes... and let's not forget a freshly baked pumpkin pie from Whole Paycheque, purchased during last night's insane shopping expedition.

I think that Dr. Atkins just broke mach one while spinning in his grave.

We've finished dinner. We've cleaned up the dining room, thrown the (very expensive) placemats, napkins, and tablecloth into the wash (thanks, Sylvie!), and are recovering from dinner some hours before by watching the Food Network.

Lyssa has decided to brave the madness tomorrow that is called Black Friday this year: The first official shopping day of the Holiday Season is traditionally the first day after the Thanksgiving holiday. It's the biggest buying day of the year, which is why it's celebrated as National Buy Nothing Day by many.

I thought that shopping on this day was nuts in Pittsburgh.. it's downright insane in DC. Stores will be opening at 0600 EST/EDT tomorrow, and their sales will run until 1200 EST/EDT at the very latest. I don't think I need to mention all of the limited availability gifts that come along with a six-hour sale that begins at 0-dark-hundred on a Friday...

I honestly don't know if we're going to get up that early. Both of us are a little run down from all the stress this week, and frankly, I've celebrated Buy Nothing Day every year since I returned to Pittsburgh in 2000. I'd really like to sleep in tomorrow, and after browsing the Black Friday advertisements, there isn't much that I think would make good gifts for anyone on my list.

On the other hand, I always go out on Buy Nothing Day to watch and enjoy the madness, as well as to mess with the folks fighting over swag. I think I'm going to go Mad Max this year. I wouldn't mind going out, but I don't want to run myself into the ground for it.

I might bring my camera to document what happens - the absurd has a way of tracking me down and buying me a cup of coffee when I least expect it.

We'll see what happens. I hear the cranberry salad calling to me.

2006/11/22

I've put a new page up: Running Linux on a Dell Inspiron 700m.

Argeniss Information Security has thrown down the gauntlet by declaring a week of December of 2006 the Week of Oracle Bugs. Apparently, they've been hard at work reverse engineering Oracle 10g and writing exploits for it, and they'll release one every day for a week. They claim that they've found many more than this but it's anyone's guess if they're telling the truth or not. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on them to see what happens.

One of the witnesses to the UCLA student getting worked over with a stungun last week has stepped forward, and he's got an interesting story to tell. Apparently, he knows the guy who got worked over, and he gave volunteer campus police a hard time before real law enforcement was called in. He also makes a point in that if you've been hit with a stungun, you should not be able to get up, let alone yell about the Patriot Act due to the effect of electricity on the human musculature.

A wise man once said, "The truth is a three-edged sword. There's your side, my side, and the truth."

Tom Baker has a weblog.

2006/11/21

From the inbox, courtesy of Nexxus Six.. one John Cramer of the University of Washington is shooting for the moon, insofar as quantum physics and mysticim are concerned: He's going to try to send data to himself in the lab before he sends the data, otherwise known as retrocausality. Granted, he's going to try to do it on a scale of 50 microseconds or so, but that still violates common sense as people usually think of it, even though the laws of physics as we know them today don't rule it out. The phenomenon of quantum entanglement, in which two particles can be mere angstroms apart or on opposite edges of the known universe but still act in concert with no delay measurable by any instruments we've been able to devise so far, is well known, and messes with the heads of physicists as well as Joe and Jane Sixpack because it seems to violate a vital law of physics (namely, nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum). Quantum entanglement does not dictate how Time should work on a quantum scale, though, so hypothetically speaking, particles in entanglement can interact in meaningful ways at different times. The experiment will involve an ultraviolet laser fired through a beam splitter of some kind, which will produce entangled photons. The experiment will primarily attempt to figure out the mechanism behind entanglement - photons don't exchange quanta to communicate, as far as anyone knows.

I sometimes wonder, in my uninformed, lay-entity's way, if they aren't the same particle, which makes me wonder about the structure of space-time.

I wonder if anyone has experimented with quantum entanglement between more than two particles...

There's hacking, and then there's hacking.. a 17 year old high school student named Thiago Olsen is the eighteenth amateur scientist on the planet to construct a functional nuclear fusion apparatus. That's right.. he built a tiny fusion reactor in the basement of his parents' house, a project that took him two years to finish. As reactors go, it's not usable for power because it requires more energy to sustain the fusion reaction than it generates, which is par for the course for nuclear fusion these days. Still, it converts deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen into helium. The Slashdot crowd aside, this kid's pretty bright, and he definitely has a well-rounded life: His GPA is 3.75, and he runs both track and cross country for his high school's teams.

Kudos, Thiago. Catch me when you turn 21 and I'll buy you a drink.

In other news from the bleeding edge, physicists at the University of Utah have figured out how to represent data and read it back using the spins of individual phosphorus atoms. The substrate used in the experiments is based upon silicon and phosphorus, instead of a liquid, which makes it unique in quantum computing experiments. A minute electrical charge was used to read the pattern of electron spins of ten thousand individual phosphorus atoms on the silicon substrate, which doesn't sound like much until you realise that the quantum computing experiments performed to date involved ten billion phosphorus atoms - two orders of magnetude more.

Proof of concept? Complete.

The House of Representatives passed it - animal rights activists, violent or peaceful, are now considered terrorists.

2006/11/20

This weekend was another weekend of running around, but at least it was an enjoyable one. Our basic plans were to run to the Crystal Fox in Maryland to nose around and do a little shopping, and then head for home to meet up with Tenshi and Jarin to beat the stuffing out of each other with shinai, wiffle bats, or whatever else we could find behind our apartment complex.

Sounds like a fun, day, no?

Lyssa and I got a leisurely start to Saturday morning and met up with Hasufin and Mika at our place before hitting the beltway to head into Maryland. With good directions, it wasn't too difficult to find our way to where we needed to go for a change.

As witchy shops go, the Crystal Fox is one of the largest I've ever seen, which is to say that it's the size of a decently-sized storefront of any other kind. It's also one of the best stocked stores in the tri-state area, with a selection of books dating back to the 1950's in places (first editions, mind you) and very little fluff. It's a rare store that openly stocks books pertaining to the left-hand path, for example, which is one of the reasons that I enjoy going there. We spent over an hour poring over the shelves to see what they'd added to their stocks since the last time we were there.

After leaving the Fox we went in search of a massage therapist who was supposed to be in the area. Lyssa's been having problems lately with her shoulder and nothing anyone has thrown at it has done any good, so it's time to call in the pros. We eventually found the office but they're appointment only, which put the kibosh on getting her fixed up. Hasufin and Mika wanted to stop by an herbalist's shop in College Park called Smile to stock up for Thanksgiving, which gave Lyssa a chance to nose around the organic soaps upstairs.

We wound up getting lunch at the Jungle Grille near the University of Maryland campus after Hasufin's repeated mention of fresh, hot sweet potato fries, which go very well with freshly grilled hamburgers.

The trip home was uneventful, thankfully. Hasufin and I worked on Lyssa's shoulder for a while, and managed to make some progress at untangling the muscles. It took two of us to do it but I think we did some good.

Lyssa went to take a hot shower while the rest of us headed out back to get a little exercise, blunt weapons at hand. I've found that my leather motorcycle jacket and gauntlets work well for protection during such matches. I've also found that I prefer a weapon with a bit more heft than your average wiffle bat; my muscles can control the action more precisely.

Mika sat out on Saturday evening. I didn't get a chance to fight Kash. Hasufin has been a fencer for years, so his style definitely reflects all of that training. Tenshi isn't very tall but he is fast, and he aims high on his targets. He got me a couple of times solidly on the side of the head, which ended the matches immediately, as they would be obviously lethal blows. Jarin is a very patient fighter... we spent many minutes sizing each other up before even making a move. I accidentally hit him in the forehead, drawing blood, but it was thankfully only a superficial knock.

After that, we trooped upstairs to get ready to go out for the night. A trip to the club Midnight in downtown DC was planned for Saturday night. While we waited for Lauren to arrive the rest of us took the time to get ready. We stopped at the local 7-11 so that everyone could get cash on our way to the Metro and then trooped into the station.. only to be delayed for various and sundry reasons, such as my Metrorail card malfunctioning and Tenshi somehow not having a farecard on him.

Midnight, as always, was dimly lit, crowded with folks who all seem to know each other, and in full swing by the time we'd arrived. The cover charge is $5us for everyone, per usual.

The music on Saturday night was a good mix, even for Midnight. They played some classics that kept the floor packed and everyone happy but also had enough recent material that the younger crowd recognised. Midnight tends to have an older crowd, what appears to be a lot of folks in their mid to late 30's and 40's, and a couple of folks who are even older. Most everyone seems polite, though, and accomodating as long as you're polite to everyone else. I was grateful for the 80's set, which included classics from Joy Division and Siouxie and the Banshees.. forget feeling old, I was having a good time. Two girls there were on the dancefloor going through the motions of a raver with lightsticks, or they were until I reached into my bracers and produced a pair of light sticks that Tenshi had given me earlier... I wish I'd had a camera with me to capture the looks on their faces when I offered them. They were good sports about it, though, and had fun with them when the initial shock wore off.

Coincidence is a wonderful thing.

I think all of us headed for the Metro station around 0200 EST/EDT to head for home and thus sleep. I don't remember the trip home at all; Lyssa woke me up as we approached our destination and I stumbled back to the TARDIS, the cold air bracing me awake sufficiently to get us the rest of the way home safely. Lauren headed for home after we arrived, as did Hasufin and Mika. Everyone else sprawled out wherever they could find room and crashed.

From the Internet Storm Center, we have undocumented funny business with the latest round of patches from Microsoft.

Students at UCLA are demanding that the taser incident of last week be looked into.

2006/11/19

What kind of people would vandalise a Universalist Unitarian church?!

2006/11/18

Yep - something broke. During routine system maintenance on Leandra on Friday, I broke external DNS. It's fixed and and now running. Sorry, folks.

2006/11/17

Today is the Transgender Day of Rememberance.

This week has been, for no known reason, exhausting as hell. I've been coming home in the evenings and all but collapsing. For unknown reasons last night, though, I felt quite ambivalent about.. well.. just about everything. Wandering around Whole Paycheque with Lyssa doing grocery shopping, I came to the conclusion that I didn't feel like cooking.. I didn't want to go home.. I didn't feel like writing..

In other words, it was an "Oh, fuck it" night.

Lyssa had mentioned earlier that Cate had mentioned going out to dinner after work, and originally I'd vetoed the idea because I'd gone to a buffet for lunch at work earlier that day, but... after taking a lap around Whole Paycheque and seeing absolutely nothing that looked palatable, I called Cate back and left a message. Lyssa and I wound up organising a trip to Maryland (via the rush hour beltway) for dinner, a trip which took better than an hour due to the rain and DC traffic. The groceries we'd picked up weren't going to spoil in the TARDIS while we were out and about, so we weren't actually in any hurry.

We picked up Cate and picked our way down the rest of the highway in Maryland to the Indian restaurant Tiffin's, which has arguably the best Indian cuisine in the tri-state area. The drive to Tiffin's, no matter how long it may be, is always worth it. We had to take a minor detour because route 193 was closed off before our very eyes by a state police officer for an unknown reason (just as the rightmost two lanes of the beltway heading north were around 1845 EST/EDT last night, come to think of it), so we had to find an alternate route. Somehow I figured out where we were going and coasted into the parking lot of the restaurant on petrol fumes. All of the stop and go driving on 495 had used up the last of the TARDIS' fuel on the way there.

Dinner at Tiffin's, as it turned out, was exactly what all of us had needed. It was tasty, filling, and most of all, warming on a chilly, wet night. A night that sapped wakefulness and strength, even sitting in the brightly lit restaurant.

I'm not sure when we left or when we got home because I wasn't really paying attention. When we got home Lyssa started making a batch of cornbread and sausage stuffing for the potluck lunch while I caught up on my e-mail and wondered exactly how I'd managed to run myself into the ground this week.

My body's pretty much healed; I haven't been doing a lot lately that was physical, mostly due to the aforementioned workout that kicked my ass.

The elections nationwide about two weeks are showing signs of controversy, even though it's mostly quiet around the country. In Sarasota, Florida, over 18,000 votes are either missing or unaccounted for. That breaks down to roughly one seventh of all of the votes tallied, incidentally. The final totals aren't adding up and people are asking what, exactly, is going on.

Chances are, if you haven't heard about the UCLA student being worked over with a stungun (note: footage shows the guy getting nailed four times with the stunner and has a full audio track) you haven't been paying attention. On Tuesday night one Mostafa Tabatabainejad, an American citizen of Iranian descent was working late in a library at UCLA. He was questioned by UCLA police officers and asked to produce his ID. For whatever reason, he didn't have it on him, and got up to leave. That's when it happened. This apparently isn't an isolated incident of taser abuse; in fact, it seems to be quite the form of coercion these days.

2006/11/16

Happy birthday, Terrence. See you after Zero hour.

It seems that virtual reality, as a practical technology, isn't entirely dead. A group of researchers at the University of Manchester are using VR to treat phantom limb syndrome in a clinical manner. Phantom limb syndrome is a condition often experienced by amputees in which the brain fakes nerve impulses from limbs that no longer exist in an effort to keep those nerural networks active. Often, this manifests as pain that cannot be stopped because there is no external trigger. The system is relatively simple, as they go - a head mounted display and a number of UI devices that manipulate an avatar in a virtual space. The avatar has a full complement of limbs; the virtual limb corresponding to the amputation is controlled by the other three actuators. The idea is that the visual input tricks the user's brain into thinking that the limb is really here, which stops the spurious activity. It seems to be successful in a clinical setting.

Testimony from one General John Abizaid, US military commander presiding over the situation in Iraq, has made it out of the Congressional record and into the media: All hell's broken loose in Iraq, and the US has at most six months to clean up and get out before the academic comparisons to Vietnam are no longer academic. The violence from various sects in Iraq is getting out of control and the troops in Iraq are going to be caught in a crossfire.

Modern physics has just decided that wireless power is possible, and done the math behind it. I seem to remember a certain Serbian gentleman doing something like this around the turn of the century...

DC Comics has made the first issues of many of their Vertigo imprint series freely available on their website for people to read and download. Check 'em out - these aren't your parents' comics...

The BBC is selling props from season 28 of Doctor Who: The Genesis Ark, the Sycorax leader's helmet, and Rose Tyler's shirt from the episode New Earth, all to benefit Children in Need.

Iraq doesn't supply most of the US' oil, Canada does.

MAGfest - the Music And Gaming Festival, will be held in Vienna, Virginia in January of 2007.

The Minibosses will be playing. So will the Jenova Project. There will be a LAN room (anyone up for Diablo II?). Zircon, DJ Pretzel, Pixietricks, and Liontamer of Overclocked Remixes will also be there. And yes, there will be a costume party... I'm thinking either the Bionic Commando or Billy Lee.

Pre-registration, hoooooooooo!!!

2006/11/15

It's been an interesting couple of days, to say the least. I've started working out again, and unlike before my body is not appreciative of the extra workload. I'm still sore from a workout on Monday, something that simply does not happen to me. I'm still walking like a stickman, and my upper arms aren't in the best of shape at the moment, either. Still, that's not going to dissuade me from getting back into shape.

Cate came over after work last night; she got the job at the Library of Congress and we wanted to go out and celebrate. We wound up at Konami for sushi after work last night and split one of the best dinners we've had yet there, and then set forth for Maryland to drop her off. We got home.. I'm not entirely sure when, last night, and then collapsed into bed to sleep.

Fall in DC isn't really stable, as it is in other cities. The weather can be, by turns, bone-chilling cold, chilly, warm, sunny, grey, grey and rainy, and wet and windy all in the same week. The sun is usually set by 1800 EST around here and it gets cold pretty fast. That said, Lyssa and I have been trying to enjoy the nice weather as much as we can whenever it sees fit to grace the city with its presence.

I recall reading not too long ago that malware was going to keep using IRC as a control mechanism because the protocols are well known to the underground.. I also recall thinking at the time that the underground isn't stupid, and knows that firewalls are becoming less permissive of random outgoing TCP traffic, and that some kinds of malware as a result are ineffective. It didn't take long for exhibit A to appear. A new downloader has started making its rounds that not only pulls multiple copies of the downloader itself down, each a little different from the others in an attempt to dodge binary scans from detection and elimination utilities, but it installs a small battalian of beasties. It also registers the infected IP address with a database somewhere on the Net, using Google Maps coordinates. It also uses standard HTTP traffic to return the data in question to the point of control. The writeup doesn't state if the malware is proxy-aware or not, but it would not surprise me in the least if it was, the better to sneak past Microsoft Internet Accelerator servers on corporate nets.

Never say never, people. Spite is an excellent motivation for proving one wrong.

It seems that at least some of the rumours are true: There are a number of Babylon-5 movies in the works, featuring at least some of the original cast, and picking up where the initial five-year story arc left off. The character of Galen, played by Peter Woodward, will also return in at least one of the movies, so that suggests that at least one of the movies will pick up after Crusades. The movies will be released directly to DVD (a shame; I would have thought that the Sci-Fi Channel would have gone for it) in 2007.

"You take care of me, Simon. You've always taken care of me. My turn."

This is the height of stupidity: Being arrested for a rubber-band ball.

2006/11/14

Dear Gentoo Linux project:

Spank you very much for insisting that all updates to your distributed version of Portable OpenSSH attempt to rewrite my copy of /etc/ssh/sshd_config so that it holds a less secure configuration, such as allowing the root user to log in directly and give everyone six (6) tries to guess the password on an account. I'm also miffed that I have to explicitly turn on the "AuthorizedKeysFile" directive to allow the use of SSH certificate authentication to log into my box. You guys are pretty on the ball in many respects, including security alerts and updates; you should damn well know better than this. It would not be hard at all to write a script run during the emerge process to edit this file so that sshd is more secure.

I guess I have to do this for you.

Love and noogies,

The Doctor.

Happy 0x10'th birthday, World Wide Web!

There just might be a problem with the voting procedure if you vote for yourself and it doesn't register.

Once again, Hollywood predicts reality: Samsung and the University of Korea have invented a robotic machine gun nest that uses a pair of video cameras (one visible spectrum, one infrared) slaved to a pattern and outline recognition system to track targets, warn them, and open fire on them if they don't stop advancing. From the images in the article, there seems to be no countermeasures against paintball guns, eggs, mudpies, or someone crawling lower than the machine gun can pan.

2006/11/13

You might remember the Steve Rambam fiasco at H2k6, where he was placed under arrest before he could present at the conference. Well, apparently, he's out of jail and will be presenting at last on Thursday, 16 November 2006. He'll be at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey. The presentation will be given in room 122 of the Babbio Center.

This last weekend, in short, wound up getting torn right out from under us, through no fault of our own.

Lyssa and I had made plans to have some folks over for boffer-battles and movies to take advantage of what was probably the last weekend of nice weather in the DC area for the year. We discovered that her family would be in town and wanted to spend time with us, which meant that we had to drop everything and start cleaning up the apartment in preparation for the white glove test. You know the drill: Run the sweeper, dust everything, rearrange the furniture, deactivate the nuclear reactor, hide the occult paraphenalia, give the servants an expense account and hide them out at the Airport Hilton.. imagine the Jehova's Witnesses coming to spend a weekend with Doctor Stephen Strange, and you won't be far off the mark.

Well, actually, you would be off the mark, but I'm trying to be silly, here.

I wound up taking Friday off to clean up around the apartment, as well as to work on a couple of projects that've been piling up for weeks and worrying the hell out of me. Thankfully, though, the apartment was all fixed up, the laundry done, the code committed, and the bodies rendered unidentifiable through the use of quicklime. By the end of the day, my back was sore but most everything that had to get done was wrapped up. Saturday was spent running around shopping to get stuff for dinner and finishing up some last-minute chores.

Then we sat around while dinner cooked, waiting for them to arrive.

Dinner actually didn't take very long. All told, they were there for only about three hours, including dessert. I had to run back to Whole Paycheque to return a pie that, unfortunately, was bad when I'd purchased it, but that aside, things went remarkably well.

I stll regret getting another pie while I was there. We had one already for everyone else, and I really don't need it. It's still in the fridge with the other pie (cherry, which I'll pass on due to the possibility of pits). I was hoping that Jarin and Duo, who came over later in the evening, would have some that night, but that wound up not happening.

I hate wasting food.

Oh, well, the beat goes on.

Jarin and Duo didn't stay very long that night. Duo was tired and all but falling asle, and really needed a good night's rest in a proper crash space. Lyssa wasn't feeling well, either, given the stress of everyone coming over, and just wanted to rest.

Sunday was a day of sitting around in limbo while the family decided what they were going to do. Plans kept changing and Lyssa and I were pretty much stuck at home waiting for one of our phones to ring. We played a good game of Go that morning that wound up in a tie. Eventually, we drove up to the Metro station in the cold, wind, and drizzling rain (oh, did I mention that the 'last weekend of nice weather for the year in DC' ended sometime late on Saturday night?) and got on the train for Grant's place, and lunch with Lyssa's mother. Her grandmother wasn't feeling strong enough to brave the nasty weather that cancelled the driving tour of downtown DC we'd originally planned.

We wound up hiking a couple of blocks to the mall not too far away from the Ballston Metrorail stop (not realising that there was a human Habitrail connecting the station to the mall) to meet up with Lyssa's mother and brother for lunch. We wound up going to a pub, the name of which escapes me at the moment, for lunch and a quick one. Lyssa's mother and I wound up trying the ratatouille, which was quite good though a bit oily for my tastes. The pumpkin spice beer was also quite tasty, I must admit.

The four of us wound up roaming around the mall (or what we could of it) after lunch to see what we could see. I only managed to cover two floors of the mall (including the food court) before my cellphone rang. Everyone was meeting up to head home, and I sauntered over to join them, because I was coincidentally just a few tens of feet away from everyone. It was at this time that Grant showed us the covered tunnel leading back to the Metro station, and then to home.

On the train home, I was tired enough to elfnap for the twenty minutes or so it took to get home.

Following the sea change of the US government during the elections last week, George W. Bush has opened himself to suggestions about Iraq, given how far south things have gone there. Senior officers of the US military are openly voicing concerns about the situation, and his advisors are advising that he call for a decisive end, and quick, citing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as a bad sign.

Sun's really going to do it - they're opening the source of Java under the GPL.

Worth1000.com's latest Photoshop contest: Movie poster remixes.

2006/11/09

I know, I know... the SSL cert for the IMAP server expired a couple of days ago. I need to generate a new one. Sit tight.

It seems that news from the 2006 elections has made it overseas faster than expected - Iraqis are cheering the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld because they blame him for destabilising their society, citing his tactics and policies for pissing people off so much that they because the insurgents that we hear about every night on the news.

Some drinking games don't make sense, even when you're drunk. Presenting Tom Baker or Normal.

I predict a lot of 'laying on of hands' for Mr. Ted Haggard in the future.

2006/11/08

Last night Lyssa and I managed to drag ourselves off to bed around 0100 EST, after following the 2006 elections in the state of Virginia for most of the night. The results, when tallied up, are quite telling this time around: In the US Senate, the independents were pushed out as both the Democrats and Republicans each took 49 seats. In the state of Virginia, Democratic candidate Webb pushed out Allen by a hair under 8,000 votes. In the state of Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum has finally been voted out of the US Senate, so hopefully things will become sane in what used to be my home state soon. In the House of Representatives, the balance of power has shifted back toward the Democratic side, with a count of 227 to 194. Again, the lone independent representative was ejected unceremoniously. Much to my chagrin, the amendment to the Constitution of the state of Virginia that not only banned same-sex marriage but now makes it more difficult for heterosexual couples to get benefits and protections under some circumstances passed by a wide margin as of 0737 EST today. Looking at the map that breaks down the votes by presinct is most interesting... some of the comments on this are also interesting, in an 'ancient Chinese curse' sort of way.

Also as predicted, dirty tricks and technical difficulties popped up here and there. Armed goons preventing people from going to the polls? What kind of a country is this?